Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons)

by Paul Collins

  Strolling through its tearoom and mirrored ballroom, Poe now had the dazzling prospect of the life of a wealthy scion before him. He would become a Virginia gentleman; for rather than returning to Britain to finish his education, he no longer even needed to leave the state. The year before, Thomas Jefferson had opened one of the great projects of his life, the University of Virginia. In the school’s second year of existence, Edgar Allan Poe was inscribed as student number 136 in its enrollment book.

  For the first few months, it seemed to be going well.

  “I this morning received the clothes you sent me,” Edgar wrote from Charlottesville to his father, “viz an uniform coat, six yards of striped cloth for pantaloons & four pairs of socks—The coat is beautiful and fits me exactly.”

  Poe’s concerns were the usual ones of a college student away from home, including a shortage of money so immediate that he asked for another hundred dollars within a week of arriving on campus, and discovering he needed clothes and other items that he’d left at home. (“Send me a copy of the Historiae of Tacitus—it is a small volume—also some more soap.”) He’d also left a girlfriend back in Richmond, Elmira Royster, whom he had met over the summer. He dutifully wrote letters to her, and soon joined the long college tradition of wondering why they went unanswered.

  Still, his new college digs—the auspiciously chosen Room 13 of his dorm—represented a new freedom for him, and an artistic sanctuary. Amid his spartan wooden furnishings and flickering tallow candles were copies of Voltaire and Historie Ancienne that he’d borrowed from the college library, and a prized illustrated copy of Lord Byron. Poe used one of the book’s plates to draw a life-sized portrait on his dorm-room ceiling; it had only been two years since the great Romantic poet died while joining the Greek war for independence, and Poe had a seventeen-year-old’s appreciation for a scandalous artist’s glorious death.

  The scandals outside his door were a different matter. On a campus where the rotunda was still half-built, and the library’s books hadn’t even been catalogued, Jefferson had created an extraordinarily forward-thinking experiment in education—a school with an entirely elective curriculum, and self-policed through a student honor code. The result during Poe’s time there was sometimes less like Utopia than a barbaric state of nature. One UVA student horsewhipped a classmate over a card game, while another pair took to libeling each other so furiously, Poe marveled, that “every pillar in the University was white with scratched paper” from their opposing flyers.

  Others sank their teeth into each other in a more literal manner.

  “I saw the whole affair—it took place before my door . . .” Poe wrote to his father of one savage fight that resulted in bite wounds. “I saw the arm afterwards—It was really a serious matter—It was bitten from the shoulder to the elbow—and it is likely that pieces of flesh as large as my hand will be obliged to be cut out.”

  Still, Poe tried to fit in by gulping down the favored campus drink of peach brandy, emptying his glasses at a single toss. But even then, Poe seemed curiously aloof—and, perhaps, just a little too serious about his art. After reading aloud to classmates a short story featuring a character named Gaffy, it instantly stuck to an exasperated Poe as his college nickname.

  “My impression was and is that no one could say that he knew him,” a classmate mused years later of “Gaffy.” “He wore . . . a sad, melancholy face always, and even a smile, for I don’t remember his ever having laughed heartily, seemed forced.” It was a trait that others noticed in Poe. “He was a beautiful boy—Not very talkative,” his girlfriend Elmira observed. “When he did talk, though, he was pleasant, but his general manner was sad.” Perhaps, as he sometimes hinted, his melancholy disposition came from his birth parents and their tragic end; but if so, it was deepened by John Allan’s refusal to formally adopt him, which left Edgar’s place in the world always slightly uncertain.

  Yet Poe was at ease in the classroom. He’d signed up for two courses—Ancient Languages and Modern Languages, which met at alternating mornings on a 7:30–9:30 schedule. Poe coasted through them, relying on a natural ability so great that he went into class nearly unprepared. His freshman year came to an end in December 1826, with exams administered by no less than Jefferson’s two fellow Republican successors: James Madison and James Monroe. Poe scored top marks in Latin and solid ones in French.

  The end of the school year, though, was not a happy one. Poe crossed paths with William Wertenbaker, a fellow student who also served as the campus librarian—a sympathetic ear on a campus where the young poet had never entirely fit in. He found “Gaffy” so ready to abandon campus that he’d smashed up his dorm-room furniture to save on buying firewood for his final nights there.

  “It was a cold night in December,” Wertenbaker said, “and his fire having gone pretty nearly out by the aid of some tallow candles, and the fragments of a small table which he broke up for the purpose, he soon rekindled it, and by its comfortable blaze I spent a very pleasant hour with him.”

  Poe still hadn’t turned eighteen, and was younger than most of his classmates, but Wertenbaker knew him as a fine scholar—he’d seen Poe take on an extra-credit assignment at translating Italian poetry, one that none of his classmates had bothered with. What the librarian hadn’t known was that their young genius was in deep trouble. As Poe sat by the embers of his table, he revealed his secret: that after being sent to college without enough money, he’d resorted to the quickest and most disastrous solution. Poe was up to his eyes in gambling debt.

  “He spoke with regret of the large amount of money he had wasted and of the debts he had contracted,” Wertenbaker wrote. “He estimated his indebtedness at $2,000, and though they were gaming debts, he was earnest and emphatic in the declaration, that he was bound by honor to pay at the earliest opportunity.”

  Biographers ever since have puzzled over why Allan failed to give Poe enough money. It is hardly a mystery to any first-generation student. John Allan was an immigrant who never attended college; what he understood was business, secondary schools, and the occasional tutor fee. In the same issue of the Richmond Enquirer that showed Poe’s name atop a column of UVA results, there were over a dozen ads for local finishing schools—that was the world Allan knew. Of the time and money necessary for college, and its cultivation of sheer intellectual curiosity, he was ignorant; when Poe complained about being underfunded, Allan shot back that his son had wasted his education on things like reading Don Quixote.

  Poe arrived back in Richmond for the holidays with his deadbeat reputation preceding him: the letters to his girlfriend were intercepted by her father, and creditors lurked at social gatherings, ready to take Edgar aside for a quiet word. Worse still, Charlottesville merchants dunned the Allans with Edgar’s bills for clothes, laundry, and firewood. John Allan could certainly afford to pay them—in fact, he’d just been named to the board of the Bank of Virginia. But he refused, pointedly referring creditors back to his penniless teenaged son.

  Poe found the only opportunity given to him was an unpaid job in his father’s warehouse, where he might learn a practical trade. The boy who had been translating Latin and French to former presidents just days earlier now found himself facing virtual servitude to the Allans.

  “Mr. Allan was a good man in his way, but Edgar was not fond of him,” a family acquaintance later recalled. “He was sharp and exacting, and with his long, hooked nose, and small keen eyes looking from under shaggy eyebrows, he always reminded me of a hawk. I know that often when angry with Edgar he threatened to turn him adrift, and that he never allowed him to lose sight of his dependence upon his charity.”

  Technically, Edgar remained a guest in Allan’s house, for he’d never been formally adopted—he was still, strictly speaking, an indigent orphan. When a constable showed up at the mansion in March 1827 to serve Poe for unpaid debts, he was astounded to walk away empty-handed, with the report that he could “find no property to levy execution on.” The next step was quite
possibly jail—and by the end of the week, Poe was on the run.

  He didn’t go very far at first. Kicked out by his father, he found a room in a Richmond inn and wrote a scathing declaration: “My determination is at length taken—to leave your house and endeavor to find some place in this wide world—to be treated—not as you have treated me.” But one day later, out of food and money, a second letter by the scorned boy turned heartrending. “I am in the greatest necessity, not having tasted food since Yesterday morning. I have no where to sleep at night, but roam about the Streets—I am nearly exhausted . . .” At the end of the letter is a single ragged and unpunctuated line of postscript: I have not one cent in the world to provide any food

  And then—just like that—Edgar Allan Poe disappeared.

  “I’m thinking Edgar has gone to Sea to seek his own fortunes,” John Allan noted offhandedly a week later, sounding remarkably unconcerned. Yet that spring, Peter Pease, a Virginian visiting the docks of Boston, recognized a curiously familiar countenance in a shabbily dressed warehouse clerk named Henri Le Rennet.

  “Edgar!” Pease innocently hailed, and the clerk frantically pushed him into an alleyway.

  “Poe begged him not to speak his name aloud,” a relative recalled, “giving for his reason that ‘he had left home to seek his fortune, and until he had hit it hard he preferred to remain incognito.’ ”

  Fortune had thus far eluded him. “Henri” was cheated out of his pay by his warehouse boss; after he then landed a job as a commodities reporter at a Boston newspaper, the firm collapsed, along with his paycheck. Spurned by his foster family, Poe found some solace in recalling his scattered siblings and his old love of poetry. He’d only ever had a few meetings with his older brother, Henry Poe, whose career as a sailor and aspiring poet seemed curiously yoked to his own. That January, Henry published his first poems in the Saturday Evening Post, and their kid sister, Rosalie, had written some poems, too. For this achingly brief moment in 1827, the three children of David and Eliza Poe were united again in poetry.

  Broke, despairing, his landlady ready to throw him out—facing homelessness and oblivion at eighteen—a sheaf of poems had become Edgar’s last chance at leaving any earthly trace. With the little money he had, the self-styled Mr. Le Rennet found an aspiring local printer as young as himself and commissioned about fifty copies of the slim, anonymous volume that looked to be his first and last work: Tamerlane and Other Poems. By A Bostonian.

  An obscure forty-page chapbook, Tamerlane almost begged to be overlooked, a judgment at first glance endorsed by the author himself. “The greater part of the Poems which compose this little volume were written in the year 1821–2, when the author had not completed his fourteenth year,” the still-anonymous poet announced in a brief preface, by way of excusing the verses.

  Biographers often assume, on no particular grounds, that Poe’s anonymity and the claim of juvenilia were to distance himself from criticism of the poems—a curious belief given Poe’s lifelong immodesty regarding his own talents. In fact, the evidence of Poe’s own word and those of his Richmond contemporaries was that 1821–2 was indeed when he first began seeking to publish his poetry. The poems he brought to Boston may have been much revised or altogether new, but they were the fulfillment of a dream that he’d held since he was twelve. And his recourse to a pseudonym is easily explained: he was dodging creditors. It took another six years for federal law to ban the use of debtor’s prisons; revealing himself on a title page would expose Poe to far greater dangers than mere bad reviews.

  Most of his volume’s poems dwelled on the standard subjects of a young poet still in thrall to Romantics like Lord Byron and Thomas Moore: youth, love, lost youth and lost love, and the obliterating passage of time and ambition. “I have been happy—tho’ but in a dream,” he proclaims in his poem “Dreams,” and his closing poem “The Happiest Day” lays out the crushing sense of loss more plainly:

  The happiest day—the happiest hour

  My sear’d and blighted heart hath known,

  The highest hope of pride, and power,

  I feel hath flown.

  Of power, said I? yes! such I ween

  But they have vanish’d long alas!

  The visions of my youth have been—

  But let them pass.

  To see in all this the dashed dreams of a would-be Virginia gentleman is a fair interpretation of the poem, and yet perhaps not a very useful interpretation of Poe himself. The life of an author may say much about a work of art; the reverse is a shakier proposition. So much depends on the subjective experience of the work—and so little of one’s life may go into a particular piece—that the use of art to fill in the blanks of biography, while tempting, is to misunderstand art and biography alike.

  The loss of youth and dashed ambition were standard themes of Romantic poetry, after all; they are as unsurprising in Poe’s volume as that era’s thuddingly matched end-rhyme, right down to jangling pairs of “pass” with “grass,” and “night” with “light.” His vocabulary could also turn vague and platitudinous, with plenty of “visions,” and enough talk of “a dream” and “dreams” that both turn up as poem titles.

  What was less conventional in Poe’s poetry was his mastery at creating dramatic pauses through em-dashes. Employing punctuation as the textual equivalent of musical rests—a comma counting for one beat, a dash for two, a colon for three, and a period for four—was an eighteenth-century tradition that Poe had learned in childhood, where this rhythmic approach to language still formed part of his earliest lessons from The English Spelling Book. But even more striking was his use of a first-person narrative “I” addressing “you,” and not simply as an author addressing the reader. After variously living as Edgar Poe, Edgar Allan, and Edgar A. Poe, he was now living under his fourth identity as Henri Le Rennet—and he had learned how to skillfully adopt the voices of fantastic, entirely fictitious personae.

  Nowhere was this clearer than in his titular poem, “Tamerlane”—a work that Poe already knew was his most accomplished and mature. In it, his narrative persona has gained a precise name and voice; his meter and rhyme have shifted to more closely mimic conversation, subtly undergirding the lines rather than jacketing them. The grand subject of the rise, fall, and exile of the legendary Turkish conqueror, too, is different—though to a reader in the present, there is perhaps nothing anonymous or mythic about the “Bostonian” here. The very first words of “Tamerlane” seem to mimic the miseries of a spurned son: “Kind solace in a dying hour ! / Such, father, is not (now) my theme—”

  Tamerlane, in Poe’s use of a fictive tradition, now faces his deathbed regretting a life of ruthless conquest pursued at the expense of his young love—“a kingdom for a broken heart.” The disastrous loss of youth lurks throughout the poem (“I have not always been as now”), along with the relentless approach of mortality:

  Father, I do firmly believe—

  I know—for Death who comes for me

  From regions of the blest afar

  Where there is nothing left to deceive,

  Hath left his iron gate ajar . . .

  Yet, for many years, it was not just life but Tamerlane and Other Poems itself that seemed to disappear through that deathly iron gate. Poe’s little book did not meet with a single review; like many first works of poetry, it found only crushing silence. But for a miserable clerk on the Boston docks, eking out enough money to print fifty anonymous copies, this may never have been the point. Whether the world at large recognized him or his work, something had changed inside the shifting identity of the fugitive Edgar Allan Poe—something irrevocable.

  He was an author now.

  2

  Manuscript Found in a Bottle

  BY THE TIME Tamerlane and Other Poems came out, anyone seeking its author on the Boston docks would find that Henri Le Rennet had simply . . . disappeared. One Virginia debt collector reported to a creditor that their deadbeat had likely run off to a foreign revolution.

&
nbsp; “Poe has gone off entirely, it is said, to join the Greeks,” he wrote despairingly. “He had as well be there as anywhere else, I believe, for he appears to be worthless.”

  Had they consulted the manifests of ships leaving Boston, though, they may have spotted a curiously familiar name among a group of new army recruits headed for Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. After months of scraping by, the eighteen-year-old Poe assumed his fifth incarnation on May 16, 1827: Private Edgar A. Perry, age twenty-one. Both his name and his false trail were drawn straight from that week’s newspapers. There was a relief ship from the Greek Committee of Boston about to leave the harbor; as for his name, though one of his old UVA classmates has been suggested as an inspiration, a simpler explanation also lay in that week’s Boston papers: excited reports of the London departure of polar explorer Captain William Parry, whose HMS Hecla was bound for the North Pole. Poe had a longstanding fascination with the mysterious poles of the earth; some had even theorized that they were giant holes into which humans venturing too close would irretrievably disappear. For an adventurous young man reinventing himself, what better new name to take?

  The voyage to Fort Moultrie was so rough that the army lost a sister ship in the storm, and Poe’s regiment arrived thankful to escape with their lives. Yet the island fortress seemed as barren a destination as Captain Parry’s Arctic: “It consists of little else but sea sand,” Poe later wrote, with “no trees of any magnitude” and “some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, during summer, by fugitives from Charlestown dust and fever.”

  Still, military life suited him curiously well; the US Army has the distinction of being the only institution to steadily support and appreciate the talents of Edgar Allan Poe while he was still alive. Assigned to an artillery battery and trained to prepare munitions, “Perry” now had food, clothing, shelter, and a reliable if modest salary of ten dollars a month. Before two years of his five-year stint were finished, he’d already risen to the highest enlisted rank of Regimental Sergeant Major.